


The Terribleness of Imagination: Or the Public Transport Problems of Matthew Swift

by HardModePlus



Category: Matthew Swift Series - Kate Griffin
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-11
Updated: 2014-12-11
Packaged: 2018-03-01 02:22:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2756015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HardModePlus/pseuds/HardModePlus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It would be nice for Matthew Swift to have some time to get used to having legs post The Glass God.  Unfortunately, London never sleeps and he has an invisible bus to catch, preferably before it kills someone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Terribleness of Imagination: Or the Public Transport Problems of Matthew Swift

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tiriel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiriel/gifts).



> Thank you to SlowMercury for the beta.

We were risking death by crushing, the longer we stayed in our office. I had established that our office was more of an open plan recycling station, and while this meant that we were no longer directed to read reports in our office urgently — the most important ones still being funnelled through Kelly — we still risked a deluge of paper drowning us whenever we were not careful how we moved. My out of body experience, as Kelly was calling it, did not improve the situation.

I had suggested field testing the flamethrowers in the armoury, a suggestion that was ignored with a smile like a lighthouse on a foggy night and a sunny reminder that while she and I understood that I was just making a joke to take my mind off my recent trauma, not everyone understands you like I do, Mr. Mayor so would you mind taking a look at this memorandum about the ghouls haunting the DSS office.

I did mind, and told her so. Then we read the memorandum. And the next one she offered, trusting that she was telling us the truth that this one was really important. She asked us what we wanted to be done about them, and we told her that we were delegating the DSS office problem and our delegating should be encouraged because we were new to management, but please leave the memos behind when she went.

When she left, we read the second memo again.

It was a missing person report for Luke Gallowglass, bus driver of thirty years, and a magician of small talent and even smaller inclination to use it. After what could generously be described as ‘dabbling’ in his teens, he’d given it all up after a bad experience with a potion gone awry. No family, no friends at work, and he’d been reported missing by a neighbour annoyed about a whining dog.

He was last seen driving a bus, also missing. His employer decided he’d stolen it, though why someone would still a council bus is best left unexplored. Unfortunately, he’d run afoul of some little shit with more imagination than sense who wanted to create Hogwarts and had used a summoning circle to do it. We hadn’t been able to stop him, on account of me being spread across the entire world, but he’d been stopped by the limits of his own ability. I’m told that the cleanup was minimal. Still, there was a bus continuously driving around the streets of London with a poor sorry bastard trapped behind the wheel.

If Penny had been back from her trip overseas, we’d have called her and sent her to go. It was my fault she was not in the city, but that still meant that I had to take care of it myself.

Sleep had done much to restore us, but we were still unfamiliar with how our legs worked. It was our knees that were the problem; they bent in the wrong way and too easily. We were uncertain whether they would hold our weight or whether they would decide that holding us up was too much work.

I walked anyway. The lift gave us time to recover, leaning against the wall as we caught our breath and allowing us to stop our legs from trembling under our weight. I kept an eye out for Aldermen intent on nefarious deeds like additional paperwork, but luck was on our side.

As we exited into the street, I stopped for a moment. I breathed in the smog of London traffic, blinked in time with the flash of the pedestrian crossing and took directions from the pavement through the soles of my shoes. It had been a while since I had been this close to a city, to _my_ city, close enough to see it all, instead of just its nervous system of the electric wires. We didn’t think it looked so different, but I drunk it in anyway. Today, I would not fear the madness of sorcerers. I didn’t think I was human enough anymore to be driven mad by the rhythms of a big city.

I still avoided the pull of the Thames. Instead, I found a bus stop, pulled a broken telly remote I had salvaged from a rubbish dump, and brandished it at the road. I waited a minute, and a double-decker bus showed up. The door opened, and I tapped on my Oyster card under the wild-eyed stare of the bus driver whose hands were gripping the steering wheel in a white-knuckled clutch that was not entirely his own. I sat down behind the driver, the door closed, and the driver steered the bus like a marionette manipulated by an apprentice puppeteer and the bus drove through a building like a knife through smoke.

“Hi,” we said cheerfully. We waved at his terrified face in the driver’s mirror. “Nasty little piece of work here, isn’t it?”

“I just drove through another building!” he wailed in reply. Luke Gallowglass was not enjoying his new career change as driver of an invisible bus. “And I haven’t had any of my tea breaks! I should have had one hours ago!”

“More than that,” I said. “You’ve been driving for four days.”

He drove the bus through another building. “Can’t have! I’d be entitled to overtime and you bet no-one’s going to bloody pay for that! Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“We’re the Midnight Mayor,” I sang out. “Just give me a minute and I’ll have you free.” I pulled a small bundle of paper, folded roughly into quarters, out of my satchel. I ignored his headshake of terrified disbelief as we unfolded the sheets of paper and began to read.

“Article 7: after a driving period of four and a half hours a driver shall take an uninterrupted break of not less than 45 minutes, unless he takes a rest period.” I could feel the metal walls of the bus straining as it tried to listen to me and not to the spell that kept it from being fully real. “This break may be replaced by a break of at least 15 minutes followed by a break of at least 30 minutes each distributed over the period in such a way as to comply with the provisions of the first paragraph.”

The bus was shuddering the full body shudders of an animal in pain. “Article 8: A driver shall take daily and weekly rest periods!” We yelled over the sound of tormented metal. “Within each period of 24 hours after the end of the previous daily rest period or weekly rest period a driver shall have taken a new daily rest period!”

The spell broke. The bus materialised, and Luke Gallowglass slumped over the steering wheel, his strings cut, unheeding of the long blare of the horn. He started to cry. We didn’t know what to do, so I patted his shoulder, trying to be reassuring. We used our other hand to text Kelly. We wrote:

> Job’s done.

She replied in under a minute. She wrote:

> Mr. Mayor, we need to work on your work-life balance! You did just wake up from an out of body experience, you know, and while Dr. Seah did give you a clean bill of health she did say to take it easy! Please keep your phone on so that I can direct the clean up crew. Thank you!

The clean up crew arrived in under ten minutes in an armoured van, spilling out from the back doors like a pool of ink. With their attention caught by the bus and the sobbing Gallowglass, we thought we could slip away while the horde of black-clad Aldermen cleaned up.

“Mr. Mayor!” Kelly sang out from the back of the bus as we tried to sneak by. She patted the seat next to her. “It won’t take long for the cleanup crew to finish up and then we can get you back to bed.”

We knew when we were beaten. We sat next to her, accepted her offer of a blanket and leaned against the wall of the van, and let ourselves drowse to the hum of the city.


End file.
